More Boston AMs, March 2006

On the final day of Ari, Lisa, and Scott's visit to Boston (see WESX, WFNX, and WJDA, March 2006 for previous days), Scott and I met with Grady Moates, who (in addition to being chief engineer for the WUMB stations) is a consulting engineer for several of Boston's second-tier AM stations, including WSRO (650 Ashland), WBIX (1060 Natick), WRCA (1330 Waltham), WWZN (1510 Boston), and WUNR (1600 Brookline). As such, he has been heavily involved in the project to upgrade WUNR's facilities and relocate WRCA and WKOX to the same site. That morning, Grady showed us around his biggest site (for now), the four-tower array of WWZN in Waltham, which has an unusual 50 kW-U DA-3 configuration. We then went to the WKOX site in Framingham to see WBIX's new day transmitter, a BE 4MX50, which represents an enormous improvement in efficiency over the station's old Gates MW-50; we also saw WKOX's new BE AM-10A.

We went to lunch at Joan & Ed's Deli in Sherwood Plaza, Natick, where Lisa and Ari joined us after an exciting morning at the Build-A-Bear in the Natick Mall. Lisa was kind enough to let Scott accompany Grady and me to the WUNR transmitter site in Oak Hill, Newton, to get some pictures of the facility before construction of the upgrade. (See WUNR/WKOX/WRCA construction progress, Spring 2007 for a progress update.) Since we were going to drive past it anyway, Grady also took us by the WRCA transmitter site at the WCRB studios in Waltham, where chief Rob Landry also showed us his studios.

(At the time of our visit, WCRB was still on the market, but nobody at the station was sure what their future would be. In a complex deal involving Greater Media, WCRB's studio facilities and programming ended up in the hands of Nassau Broadcasting, with Greater getting the 102.5 Waltham signal and a Philadelphia-market move-in; the Jones Trust getting lots of cash; and Nassau getting the WCRB real estate and intellectual property, 99.5 Lowell, and cash. Most of the WCRB airstaff seem to have been kept on, but I don't know about the behind-the-scenes staff.)